ΑΓΟΡΑ ΕΛΕΑΝΟΣ is an ongoing conceptual art and research project centred on the many forms and registers of disappearance. Operating in Athens and its surrounding areas, it traces a line from the forced kidnappings of the 1960s and 70s military junta to today’s fatal pushbacks; from the quieter yet erosive processes of economic displacement to the privatisation of public goods and the vanishing of cash during the Greek crisis. Across these sites, the project examines disappearance not as a singular event but as a recurring logic shaping contemporary life.

Rather than approaching disappearance simply as that what is “gone” or “absent”, the project considers ‘The Void’ – the zone to which the vanished withdraw – as the inverse of what we commonly accept as visible, sensible, or even real. Drawing on Paul Virilio (1980), Gil Doron (2008), Anna Tsing (2004) Jacques Lacan (2007), Deleuze & Guattari (1987), and Jacques Rancière (2004), disappearance is re-interpreted as a spatio-temporal event emerging from the frictions and interstices of meaning – a lapse in knowability that is explicitly geographic.

Combining multi-sited sensorial and spatial ethnography with artistic intervention, the project probes the dominant paradigm of unified, homogenous space-time. Instead, it traces how the illusory and the Real continuously fold into one another, and how disappearance operates not only through absence but through speed, saturation, and disorientation.

Eventually envisioned as a multi-media installation, this selection offers a preliminary overview of the materials collected and produced within ΑΓΟΡΑ ΕΛΕΑΝΟΣ.